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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,538 posts.
System calls are a way for unprivileged, user applications to request services from the kernel. In the RISC-V architecture, we invoke the call using the ecall instruction. This will cause the CPU to halt what it's doing, elevate privilege modes, and then jump to whatever function handler is stored in the mtvec…
These days it’s a pretty bold claim if you say that you invented a sorting algorithm that’s 30% faster than state of the art. Unfortunately I have to make a far bolder claim: I wrote a …
A look inside Copilot’s network traffic, harness, memory, and how context is becoming the product.
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse , keyboard , terminal and…
After reading a recent post by Steve Souders concerning a free tool called dynaTrace Ajax , I was intrigued. It claimed to provide full tracing analysis of Internet Explorer 6-8 (including JavaScript, rendering, and network traffic). Giving it a try I was very impressed. I tested against a few web sites but got the…
How I finally decided what is better (for me), Lisp or Haskell?
Aditya Bhargava's personal blog.
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks
I was talking to a very junior programmer recently and he asked me a great question. A question so good, it made me stop and think about my perspective on how learning happens. The question was: “H…
AI-assisted mechnical proving companies are raising funds on billion dollar valuations , new people are trying proof assistants, overwhelmingly Lean, at unprecedented rates. Models achieve fascinating results in competitions previously considered to contain some of the hardest problems in the world, such as IMO, ICPC…
Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious! Today’s pick is the latter. Reproducing the issue, part 1 (It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important p...
I worked on Rust part-time for several years at Mozilla. During that period I regularly summarized how the compiler’s performance had improved. For example: 2017-11-12 to 2019-07-24.
Why I haven't been writing much Haskell code lately.
I do not write code for a living. Nor do I study computer science in university. And you know why this is great? Because it allows me to code completely stupid and useless things without anybody being on my back to tell me I shouldn’t. And what I am about to talk is precisely one of these codes…
Continuing in the series of posts about lesser-known bash features , here I take you through seven variables that bash makes available that you may not have known about.
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
A comparison of MVC web frameworks with React.js and ClojureScript circa 2014.
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
